Selected links that seem to deserve a bit more traction and longevity than a simple mention on twitter. Big themes this week were the release of Rails 2.3 RC 1 (which I explored through my work on the theme_support plugin and Clay Shirky’s series of talks in London. theme_support aside, I’ve mostly been focussed on some to-be-revealed developments to Generous and release an early version of the new Street Action site (DNS will hopefully propagate on that soon).
Interaction Design Pilot Year (Courses) » ToyView » Overview
“In this class, students created innovative ‘magical’ concepts, that are physical, serving as controllers and actuators for functions dealing with digital data. Digital data can be a wide set of elements, starting from pure text and ending in audio, videos, images, and at times even social particles. The emphasis was on creating a new hybrid of physical computer games.” - via @moleitau
PSFK’s Good Ideas Salon: What are the hot ideas in mobile?
Matt Jones: “We should be an embodied person in the world rather than a disembodied finger tickling a screen walking down the street. We need to unfold and unpack the screen into the world.” Lovely.
A Plugin Development Pattern » Learning jQuery
Some nice tips to bear in mind when building jQuery plugins.
Mashing up planning data with Google Maps
Some local government departments are using the PlanningAlerts.com service to populate their own websites! I’ve no idea if the scrapers I wrote a year or so ago for PlanningAlerts got any usage, but it’s good to see the site getting some use regardless. Just a shame the councils don’t have the data exposed cleanly even for their own internal use!
Ruby on Rails 2.3 Release Notes
They’ve packed a lot into quite a short release cycle
Ryan’s Scraps: What’s New in Edge Rails: Nested Object Forms
Another write up of the nested object forms functionality in Rails 2.3. Very nice to see a standardised solution to this, since almost every project seems to tackle it at some point
Engines in Rails 2.3
Some support for “Rails Engines”, plugins that look a bit like mini-apps, has been built into Rails 2.3 James Adam’s write up shows how this compares with his Engines plugin.
Fraser Speirs – On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09
Good write up, from an entirely biased but very thoughtful source. It sounds like Apple built Facebook integration into iPhoto and then tacked flickr on without much thought to how experienced users actually use flickr. Maybe they should hire Fraser to help them out with that?
TED 2009 Write ups
A series of writeups of this year’s TED talks. I’ve particularly enjoyed the updates from Erik Hersman
The Changing Role of Nonprofits
Amy Sample Ward’s reflections, driven by an interview she conducted with Clay Shirky while he was in London
How Twitter Was Born
An early history of the web app that now dominates so many of our lives.